The folks at The Mac Observer interview Jordan Hubbard regarding his time as a founder of FreeBSD, heading Apple’s UNIX team, and his many contributions to open source. Check out the link below to listen to the podcast.

Jordan Hubbard, the co-founder of FreeBSD, spent a dozen years at Apple bringing coherence to the UNIX core of Mac OS X. Apple calls it macOS today, but in the early years, there were lots of rough spots integrating the partly FreeBSD core into a viable consumer Mac OS X. Jordan was also instrumental in modernizing Mac OS X with features like MacPorts, Launchd, Grand Central Dispatch and application sandboxing. Today, his work complete at Apple, Jordan is an open source developer. We talked about the early development of Mac OS X derived from NeXT and even the earliest BSD origins. Along the way, we also chatted about Jordan’s childhood memories as an 8-year old being an electronics geek with Radio Shack as his Mecca. If you love macOS, don’t miss this insightful historical tour.

The developers of pfSense have announced the official version 2.3.3 RELEASE. See the link below for the full release notes. Download here.

We are happy to announce the release of pfSense® software version 2.3.3!

This is a maintenance release in the 2.3.x series, bringing numerous stability and bug fixes, fixes for a handful of security issues in the GUI, and a handful of new features. The full list of changes is on the 2.3.3 New Features and Changes page, including a list of FreeBSD and internal security advisories addressed by this release.

Lumina Desktop Environment, developed by Ken Moore of TrueOS, has been making rounds in the BSD world and is now being recognized by Linux users alike. Read the article to see how Lumina can be ideal for your Linux workflow, due to its simplicity as a lightweight desktop environment.

Lumina is a compact, lightweight, XDG-compliant graphical desktop environment developed from scratch. Its focus is on giving users a streamlined, efficient work environment with minimal system overhead.

Lumina was first developed for the BSD family of operating systems (such as FreeBSD and TrueOS). It is gaining interest among Linux users, having been introduced for a growing number of Linux distros.

I installed Fedora 24, Manjaro and PCLinuxOS on several test computers. I chose these popular Linux distros because they have add-on installations available from the Lumina project. This gave me an opportunity to take a first look at the Lumina desktop without applying an excessive amount of overhead.

In this tutorial, user ro55mo of Level1Tech shows us how to get an ownCloud setup on Raspberry Pi 3, using a FreeNAS system as a data store. Follow the link below for the full set of instructions.

This guide is intended for the installation of OwnCloud on a RaspberryPi 3 with a FreeNAS server as the storage backend.

I am aware this is rather backward as FreeNAS has an OwnCloud plug-in you can install but I wanted to see if it was possible.

Objective

The object is to have the RaspberryPi act as a web front end for the backend storage. Their are guides on doing this with external USB drives but a FreeNAS server with ZFS and RAID struck me as a more sensible storage solution.

The storage must be totally transparent to the user (me). I don’t want to have to rely on the “external” storage module that comes with OwnCloud as these all end up with seperate folders inside your view of OwnCloud. If this was the case and I forgot to upload something to the right folder I could exhaust the 16GG MicroSD card on the RaspberryPi very fast.

As stated elsewhere in the guide my FreeNAS box is not in its “final form” yet. But once it is and I have an offsite backup in place I will replace Dropbox and Google drive with this solution.

The developers of of OPNsense have made available the official release of version 17.1, dubbed “Eclectic Eagle”. You can see the full list of feature additions and changes at the official announcement below.

Hi everyone,

The OPNsense team is proud to announce the final availability of version 17.1, nicknamed “Eclectic Eagle”. This major release features FreeBSD 11.0, the SSH remote installer, new languages Italian / Czech / Portuguese, state-of-the-art HardenedBSD security features, PHP 7.0, new plugins for FTP Proxy / Tinc VPN / Let’s Encrypt, native PAM authentication against e.g. 2FA (TOTP), as well a rewritten Nano-style card images that adapt to media size to name only a few.

We would like to encourage everyone to supervise this major upgrade physically. As such, it cannot be performed from the GUI. Instead, go to the root console menu, choose option 12 and type “17.1” at the prompt. The process will download a full set of updates and reboot multiple. All operating system files and packages will be reinstalled as a consequence. This process can also be remotely triggered via SSH.

For fresh installations, images are provided with OpenSSL for 32 and 64 bit Intel architectures. The new SSH installer feature will be listening on the LAN port 192.168.1.1, give out DHCP leases to clients and can connect using the user “root” (console menu) or “installer” (the installer, of course) with the default password “opnsense”.

Mirrors

The respective checksums for the images can be found below this announcement and the direct download links from our capable mirror providers are as follows:

What’s different with OpenRC?

TrueOS now uses OpenRC to manage all system services, as opposed to FreeBSD’s RC. Instead of using rc.d for base system rc scripts, OpenRC uses init.d. Also, every service in OpenRC has its own user configuration file, located in /etc/conf.d/ for the base system and /usr/local/etc.conf.d/ for ports. Finally, OpenRC uses runlevels, as opposed to the FreeBSD single- or multi- user modes. You can view the services and their runlevels by typing $ rc-update show -v in a CLI. Also, TrueOS integrates OpenRC service management into SysAdm with the Service Manager tool: …

Jordan Hubbard recently spoke at BayLISA, a system administrator group that meets monthly in the Silicon Valley. His talk was about the latest happenings in FreeNAS 10 and was held at Groupon, Palo Alto. Click play below to watch:

This tutorial by user Guy, Robot will show you how to configure a FreeNAS 9 installation to run on your VMware ESXi hypervisor. Check out the two videos below on how to get a FreeNAS virtual environment set up. In addition, Guy, Robot also shows us his custom FreeNAS build at the link below.

Just a quick post today. Last week I wrote in detail about the NAS that I setup at the start of the year. It’s been a really fun project – in particular getting FreeNAS running smoothe and stable in a virtual machine using hardware pass-through.

As promised last week I’ve created some detailed videos that look at how to get a fresh ESXi 6.5 installation ready for my hardware (including integration with the Realtek 8110 network card that isn’t supported by default in the latest versions of VMware) and how to configure your FreeNAS installation to be ready to serve iSCSI RAID disks to a hypervisor of your choice.

Rather than go through everything in detail here I’ve created a couple of videos to talk you through the process – check them out below.